Google’s songwriting program learns by combining statistical learning and explicit rules—the same approach may make it easier for engineers to shape other AI programs.

The piano ditty below, which ascends jauntily, then finishes with a tuneful flourish, sounds a bit like a jingle composed for the latest toothpaste campaign.

The tune was, in fact, dreamed up by a musical AI program developed at Google. And the program’s latest compositions show how combining a powerful machine-learning approach with simple musical rules can produce creative works that sound remarkably human.

Music composition is an enigmatic form of human creativity. Songwriting programs already exist, but they typically follow a specific set of rules, and they tend to produce tunes that feel rigid and mechanical. The same is true of software that recommends music based on your listening habits (see “The Hit Charade”). Teaching computers to be more musically inventive may point to ways that machines can help with other creative acts, from designing products to writing eloquent text.

Google has previously demonstrated its music-generating AI songsmith, which is part of a project called Magenta that’s aimed at fostering artificial creativity (see “OK, Computer, Write Me a Song”). A large neural network is fed tens of thousands of songs and is trained to predict the next note in a sequence. Such a network can also generate new music when given a starting point, although the results tend to lack structure and grace.

Douglas Eck, a research scientist at Google who’s leading the development of the music-generating AI, together with Natasha Jaques, an intern at the company, recently devised a way to make the songwriting systems produce much more elegant and catchy tunes. They use an approach known as reinforcement learning to add simple principles of music theory—avoid repeating a refrain too often, do not play too quickly or slowly, and so on—to the overall learning process. The network receives a positive reward every time it produces a sequence of notes that not only resembles the patterns seen in previous songs, but also adheres to the musical rules it has been given.

“These are simple rules taken from a music composition textbook,” Eck says. “The combination of these rules with reinforcement learning, and the variance of the real world coming from thousands of human compositions, gives us songs that are so catchy—they scratch some itch.”

The new approach certainly seems to improve automated music generation. Another snippet of music shows how the program fares without these rules to follow. The piece is feels flat, repetitive, and mechanical. Eck and Jaques also conducted a user study and found that people much preferred the compositions produced using the new technique.

Eck says the ability to embed rules in reinforcement learning will be useful in many areas, including robotics, recommendation systems, and language translation.

“There is no reason why machines cannot be curious and creative,” says Jürgen Schmidhuber, a professor at the University of Lugano in Switzerland who performed pioneering research on the type of neural networks used by Google’s researchers, and who has experimented with creativity using reinforcement learning. Schmidhuber adds that the approach could have a range of practical applications beyond music. “One could imagine similar combinations of [neural networks] and traditional rule-based expert systems for medical diagnosis,” he says.

Reinforcement learning offers a way to teach machines to do things that would be difficult to achieve through explicit instruction. The technique was employed by AlphaGo, a program developed by Google researchers to play the ancient board game Go. While the rules of Go are simple, it is hard to explain how to play well, and players normally develop an intuitive aptitude through many hours of practice. But sometimes it may be useful to be able to give explicit instruction to a machine-learning system as well.

Stevan Harnad, a professor of psychology at the University of Quebec in Canada who has studied artificial creativity, says the Magenta work is impressive, but adds that there is still a long way to go before computers can be credited with real, human-like creativity. “Deep-learning algorithms are very promising, but so far they have not yet duplicated ordinary, noncreative human capacity, so it’s a bit premature to expect them to be creative,” he says.

In fact, Harnad says, even compositions like those produced by the Google team often appear mechanical after a few listens.

Project Wing, the company’s drone division, was behind the tests

Ever imagined being able to order a burrito and have it delivered by a drone? Well, Google has you covered.

The search giant, which is now under the parent company Alphabet, began testing drone food deliveries using Chipotle burritos at Virginia Tech this week. A drone was spotted Monday flying overhead before lowering a large white package to the ground, the Roanoke Times reports.

Virginia Tech was approved as a test site for drones by the Federal Aviation Administration in 2013 and the school provided safety oversight for the Google tests, according to the Times. Project Wing, the companies drone division, conducted the experiment.

The delivery process was repeated about 10 times in 30 minutes on Monday, the Times reports. Packages only traveled about a tenth of a mile, maintaining FAA-preferred line of sight flights.